Stark Read online

  Sly itched to shout ‘who gives a fuck’ at him, but the atmosphere was wrong, people were listening and, to Sly’s astonishment, they looked scared. Eventually, to Sly’s relief, one or two around the table began to shift about a bit and fidget.

  ‘Good,’ thought Sly, ‘somebody’s going to tell the fat old bastard to save his hang-ups for his shrink.’

  But, to Sly’s further aggravation, those who wished to chip in clearly wished to do so because they felt that Slampacker was not pitching the case strongly enough. Various world-class money men, men who Sly would have bet a chain of breweries cared more about hair restoration than reforestation, started to whine about the death of trees. And it wasn’t just trees either. They were worried about a mystery virus that had made an eighth of the world’s moles impotent for Christ’s sake! One fellow seemed to be almost pervertedly interested in a mystery fungus that had appeared under the wings of sea birds.

  Sly squirmed with annoyance. All the way from WA to hear some arsehole waffle on about a gull’s armpits? Somebody’s going to skin up a doobie in a minute and they’ll all start singing ‘Blowing in the Wind’, he reflected bitterly. Bottling up his boredom and disappointment Sly sat waiting for a moment when he could decently take his leave.

  21: LOVE AND CONFUSION

  Of course, if Sly thought he was experiencing frustration, he should have tried sitting in CD’s trousers.

  CD was definitely surprised. He had thought he’d been in love before but clearly he hadn’t. Nothing he had experienced so far in life had prepared him for the gutful of emotions he had been at the mercy of since that moment at the Pissed Parrot. It was extraordinary. At first he thought he must be ill.

  CD could not understand it, all that stuff that claims to be about love; mushy stories; wet songs; unpleasant childlike cartoon figures holding hands and saying, ‘Love is doing the washing-up even when it’s not your turn’. These things CD now discovered had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with love as he was currently experiencing it. In the world of pulp publishing, pop charts and greeting cards, even when love hurts it usually hurts in a nice and tasteful way; yearning glances; attractive anguish and broken hearts. The truth is, it’s a pain in the guts.

  And that was another thing. Why is it that the heart has been singled out as the seat of all emotions? OK so it occasionally misses a beat, but what’s that compared to the long sleepless hours of dull stomach ache? The guts are unquestionably the seat of the emotions, that’s where CD felt the pain. But of course it wouldn’t look so good on the Valentine cards; eight feet of small intestine with an arrow through it or a cute little cartoon figure feeling queazy and saying ‘Love is wanting to go to the lavatory.’

  CD had been prepared by countless juke boxes to feel exhilarated, tearful, turned on by love, he certainly had not expected to feel sick. It was as if he had gone mad. He was acting in a way that he despised himself for. It was fifteen years since he had tried his hand at poetry. He had thought that shameful, inexcusable episode in his life was over and forgotten forever. There is absolutely no excuse for amateur poetry writing, it should be against the law. Teenagers, CD reluctantly accepted, should be allowed a brief foray into this repulsive, self-indulgent activity. After all, every kid in the world goes through a period when they are under the impression that they are the only person who has ever suffered, the only person who has ever really truly understood confusion and rejection, and exam revision and acne. Obviously this horrid time needs an outlet other than vandalism and hence, while it lasts, every kid is clearly entitled to pen the occasional teen-anguished epic. But these should be decently burnt within a year and the habit soon dropped. At the age of fifteen CD had decided to ditch poetry to leave more time for masturbation and had never had cause to regret the decision.

  But now what had happened? Here he was trying to find a rhyme for ‘Rachel’ and coming up with ‘bagel’. Sitting there, alone, his eyes prickling, his guts churning, trying to write something that should it ever get out would force him to commit suicide out of sheer embarrassment.

  And this was not the only alarming symptom. Everything was changing, CD was definitely not the same person he had been a week before. Conversations had become a means to bring the subject round to how much he loved this girl. He didn’t want to do it, it just seemed to happen.

  ‘Are you going to watch the footie then, CD?’

  ‘Yeah, maybe, you know I’ve met this girl called Rachel. I think she’d like footie. She’s an extraordinary girl, you know I really think I’m in love and I don’t know whether to be happy or sad or what.’

  He felt an absurd affection, even loyalty, for Carlo Criminal Court, where he had first set eyes on her. He had bought a copy of ‘Money for Nothing’ which had been on the juke box in the Pissed Parrot when he had tried to make conversation. It was ridiculous but when he played it, which was often, he always felt he had to listen to the very end or somehow he was letting her down. She would never know, and she certainly wouldn’t care, but he still had to listen to every bloody note.

  It was so weird he had only met her on a couple of occasions and yet now he thought about her literally all the time, constructing little fantasies to himself as he wandered about. Lacking almost any knowledge of Rachel at all he filled in the gaps himself. Sometimes she was Doris Day, a happy little housewife with whom CD would share the domestic chores and construct a normal life. In this dream he even had a proper job and kids were on the way. She was chirpy, devoted and, of course, insatiably saucy. Other times she was a tough, committed alternative woman intellectually brilliant, artistically innovative, courageous, combative and, of course, insatiably saucy.

  These fantasy characters bore no relation to the real Rachel and, of course, they did not need to for CD had fallen in love with her whatever she was really like and it only remained to discover what he had let himself in for. This was one thing CD did know about love: it can happen regardless of personality. How often had he noticed couples who seemed totally mismatched struggling through their lives together. Couples that made you say ‘I never would have thought he was her type’, and yet there they were, a Zen Buddhist and a female mud-wrestler applying for a mortgage and looking at curtain material. CD was discovering now for himself that love is not logical. He didn’t know anything about Rachel, why was he so certain that she was perfect? And why when, as he knew he must, he discovered that she was not perfect, did he know he would forgive her? Clearly because love hates logic, it cannot be planned, it cannot be created and it cannot be stopped. It will, at all times, do its own thing like a hippy on the dance floor or a back-packer’s bottom when it gets to India. One thing was clear, if there’s a part of the body less involved with love than the heart, it is the head. This is why CD was in such a state of disarray. He was a cleverish, cynical person, and he was out of control. Captain Love had taken command of the ship and CD was heading for the rocks.

  Clearly it was time to form a plan. CD could not go on listening to ‘Money for Nothing’ and having trouble with his bowels for ever. He had seen Rachel once since the encounter at the Pissed Parrot and it had not been a conspicuous success. All he had done was crack jokes and try to catch another tantalizing glimpse through the tiny gap that gaped between the second and third buttons of her blouse. One of the great male delusions is the belief that girls are unaware when they are being ogled. No one has ever managed to discreetly eye a cleavage. You might as well put out bunting saying ‘I am getting a stiffy’. On the other hand taking a sneak peak doesn’t necessarily mean that the peeker is falling in love. Blokes do it on instinct. So despite being acutely conscious of his staring, Rachel remained unaware of the immense turmoil that she was causing in CD’s stomach and in his trousers.

  Poor CD. Most girls suffer the subliminal harrassment of being ogled in silence but Rachel was made of sterner stuff. She could handle the embarrassment of confrontation.

  ‘Stop staring at my boobs!’ she had snapped and CD had never felt
so mortified in all his life. For the rest of the evening he had been in danger of cricking his neck in his efforts to demonstrate that he was staring at the ceiling.

  But, CD was an optimist, he reckoned that there were grounds for hope, after all, they already had quite an intense relationship. So far Rachel had embarrassed him, made him feel sick and turned him into a bore, there was certainly an emotional bond developing which he felt he could build on. What he needed was a plan.

  22: A PLAN(ISH)

  CD decided to pull himself together and concentrate. It was clear to him that a degree of serendipity was going to be required to nudge along the essential process of wooing the gorgeous Rachel. This was obvious from one glance at the differentials. She was a love goddess; she was the font from which all beauty flowed; she was a sexual weapons system waiting for a crazy man to push her button — and he was a pratt.

  Playing an honest hand CD was destined for disaster on the courtship front, so he was going to have to lie. He recalled that at their first meeting at the Pissed Parrot, Rachel had expressed interest in his bullshit about peace freak connections. So a committed ‘citizen of the world’ approach seemed to be the clearest route up her dress. This was fine as far as CD was concerned. He did not care who he pretended to be. He was so obsessively hot for Rachel’s action that he would have gone on a diet and claimed to be Mother Theresa if it had promised even the chance of a feel-up.

  As it happened there would be no element of hypocrisy in the little charade CD was planning that could besmirch the purity of his horrendous horniness. CD was hip to all the principles held dear by the peace lot, he just felt that clothes- wise a small thermonuclear blast would definitely improve their appearance. After all, there isn’t really much you can do with a tie-dye T-shirt except atomize it into oblivion so that it may never return to offend the eye.

  Reflecting on these reflections, CD determined that if he had to play a bit of a hippy, it would at least be a tastily dressed one. He would show Rachel that a concern for the future of the planet and crucial threads were not mutually exclusive. It was possible to desire peace on earth and not look like you’d been dragged through a puddle on the way to a jumble sale. Who could tell, maybe besides making Rachel his own for all eternity he would do those hippies some good!

  As he dressed, CD stared out of the window to the place where Dave used to play when CD had first come to live in his little duplex. CD didn’t know Dave. Dave was not destined to play any part in the story of Stark. In fact he was already dead. But his story is connected, as all stories are. He was, like CD and Rachel and poor Mrs Pastel, a tiny piece of the same giant jigsaw; a bit player in the same titanic tragedy for which Stark believed itself to have a solution.

  23: DAVE AND BILL: AN INVOLUNTARY KILLING

  Dave was killed by Bill.

  They never even met, but Bill killed Dave as surely as if he’d shot him in the skull. Obviously Bill never meant to do it, but few of the terrible things done in the world are meant.

  24: DULL

  It happened this way. Bill had given his life to nylon — he was very into nylon. Some people are into leather or PVC, Bill was into nylon. Not wearing it, you understand, or stretching it tight across the buttocks of a close friend and popping his thumb through at the point of least resistance. It was the structure of nylon which fascinated Bill. It needs a special type of person to be seriously into hydrocarbons. Basically you need to be very dull. Not dull in the way that is normally classed as dull, the sports bore or the person who reads the books about the SAS that you can buy reduced at station bookstalls…

  ‘Oh yes, it’s the most rigorous training in the world. Apparently they were put on full standby red-alert mode maximum kill facility alert, the moment the Home Secretary got the news.’

  Much duller than that, dull to the point where it is almost a creative act. Those who met Bill often wondered if they were missing something…‘I suppose I’m very stupid,’ they would say, ‘but I really don’t see the fascination.’

  Any single-mindedness is obviously in danger of being dull. Single-mindedness about something that is already dull is clearly double dull. The problem is that a dull person remorselessly pursuing a dull idea can appear a bit like a clever and inspired person who can see something that others can not. The well-adjusted observer begins to doubt his or her critical faculties and asks if perhaps there might not be something in it after all. This can be a bit worrying in the case of the various political and religious maniacs who want everyone to think the way they do. But in Bill’s case, it was not worrying, just very very dull.

  If you went for a drink with Bill he would somehow work the conversation round to carbon research. His only other skill besides carbon research was working the conversation round to carbon research and, it has to be said, he was pretty good at it.

  ‘Fancy a drink, Bill?’

  ‘I’d rather do a bit of carbon research.’

  But Bill was all right, he bored people but he didn’t eat them. The world and its spouse had no reason to regret Bill’s birth. Not, that is, until he killed Dave.

  The chain of events that put Bill on the path to murder started right back when he was at school. He was a total and utter fart as a kid, thin, farty and dull, dull, dull. The sort of kid who was ‘really incredibly into science’ and used this as a substitute for a personality. Every class has a couple. They take great pride in carrying sciencey things in the pockets of their blazers. Electrical screwdrivers, conversion tables, bits of wire. Their conversation is monumentally dull because they feel the need to announce their scientific obsessions in even the most commonplace sentences. If they did not do this they would cease to exist and be marked absent on the register.

  ‘Is that your chair, Jenkins?’

  ‘Specifically and fundamentally,’ replies Jenkins, ‘you would not be a hundred and eighty degrees off in presuming the affirmative.’ And then Jenkins would look pleased and slightly embarrassed as if having delivered rather a good joke.

  Bill and his ilk are awkward kids; always grinning and getting taller. They go around at break-time offering to prove by equation that one and one equals three, but then get it all wrong.

  As they grow older these people get into Deep Purple and Bowie and grow their hair in greasy mops. They start drinking cider and blackcurrant and go to university and say things like: ‘Last night we got what I believe is technically described as rat-arsed.’

  Inevitably, as a recreational subsection of their dullness, they become Real Ale bores and they are the most boring of all Real Ale bores because they can tell you the specific gravity of the beer they are drinking. Worse, they know what specific gravity is.

  Such a fellow killed Dave.

  Dave, who was not remotely boring and, were you lucky enough to meet him, would keep you enthralled for hours. Not that that makes any difference to the crime. If Dave had killed Bill it would have been just as wrong, but he didn’t. Bill killed Dave.

  25: THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS

  Bill was actually pretty bright. Whereas most science farties end up as computer programmers, he was destined for bigger things. He took three pure science ‘A’ levels and went to university determined to get into nylon. It was in the middle of Bill’s second year — during his brief dissolute phase, when he seemed to be paying more attention to the Silly Buggers Society than to nylon — that Dave was born.

  On the same night that Bill tried gamely to walk the length of the student union bar with a full half-pint of Real Ale balanced on his head and a radish up his arse, at the same moment, far away, Dave drew his first breath. Talk about the sublime and the ridiculous.

  Ironically it was also that evening, the evening bloody murder began to creep slowly into Bill’s life, that he found love. The killer met his moll. He met her upstairs at the student union, in the smaller Bistro Bar — so called because you could buy wine there. Her name was Jane and Bill boldly asked to sit beside her, remembering too late to remove the ra
dish. Jane had witnessed his earlier cavortings and pretended to be totally contemptuous of them, but really she thought the whole thing pretty exciting stuff. This was because Jane was nearly as dull as Bill — her idea of a rave was a Cadbury’s Creme Egg. She thought Bill sophisticated and a proper hoot. So worldly and romantic with his extensive knowledge of early Bowie and nylon and the future calendar of the Silly Buggers Soc’: ‘We’re going to dress up in girls’ nighties and push a double bed up the High Street to raise money for cancer.’

  And so it was that on the night Bill got his first ever girlfriend — a night of fumbling and snogging and that triumphant feeling of having grown up — on that night of all nights, Dave was born and Dave was doomed. Bill the nice, dull, git with the brand new, dull, bossy girlfriend, was to be his nemesis. There would be a terrible bloody murder; a frenzy of panic, agony and desperate violence, a moment’s shocked disbelief and it would be over. Dave was twenty-one years younger than Bill. It’s hard to say why but somehow this made what happened all the sadder.

  26: MODERN BIRTH